By Larry Riley in the Muncie Star-Press:
Twice in the last two weeks at meetings of Muncie local government the topic of tax increment financing districts have taken center stage and from perspectives possibly at approbation odds.
At its regular monthly meeting, the Muncie Public Library board had invited a retired Bruce Baldwin to discuss TIF districts. Baldwin spent 25 years heading up the Muncie Redevelopment Commission before stepping down last December.
“I haven’t even thought about TIF districts since then,” Baldwin began, adding with a smile. “I don’t even know how to spell it.”
What he doesn’t know about TIF districts probably isn’t worth knowing, given Baldwin was around at the creation of TIFs in Delaware County.
That would be in 1989, when the MRC spawned the Muncie Central City TIF district, a unique initial TIF that had no specific plan of public improvements needing a bond issuance.
TIF districts typically are formed to issue a bond for millions of dollars to be spent on improvements in infrastructure: new streets, sidewalks, utility relocation, additional sewers.
The upgrades attract private investment — new buildings, stores, industry, parking lots — and the increase in property taxes from the additional investment pays off the bonds rather than getting distributed to the various local governments, like a library board, to defray costs of public services.
The TIF district’s original base amount of assessed value on which property taxes are collected still gets allotted to those local government units, but the incremental taxes get diverted to the hands of a redevelopment commission.
We have three such commissions in Delaware County, one for Muncie, one for Yorktown, and one for the county. They each cover exclusive territories, except when part of a TIF district already created gets annexed by, say, Muncie.
That happened with the Morrison Road TIF district, half of which now is inside Muncie city limits, yet the county redevelopment commission still controls the money.
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See the full article here:
http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013312010027
